


detox/retox

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: Day6 (Band), TWICE (Band), Wonder Girls
Genre: Alternate Universe, Complicated Relationships, Developing Relationship, F/M, Female Friendship, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Hopeful Ending, JYP Nation Ensemble, Male-Female Friendship, Melancholy, Mild Sexual Content, Past Relationship(s), Slice of Life, Uncertainty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 00:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19779670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: “Do you ever feel like,” she begins, “Like, you had this whole idea of what your life would be like, and then you get to that point in life and you’ve got something entirely different than what you wanted, and you just don’t know how to feel about it, or where you went wrong?”Love is never what you daydreamed, and life goes on.





	detox/retox

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for JYP Jukebox’s first round for the song “The Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes.” I took a lot of inspiration from the (potentially misheard) lyrics _Imperfect boys with their perfect ploys / Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy_. Hope you enjoy and please check out the other fics from this event!
> 
> This is just fiction, and not intended to comment on the real lives of the people it’s inspired by.

* * *

  
  


_ Listen. _

_ In the split second before a firework explodes, there is the smallest moment of silence. A pause. A hyphen— _

_ Can you hear it? _

_ A split second—and you stand there, staring at the dark gap of space, and then— _

_ boom. _

  
  
  


_ Right now, you’re living in that silence. Holding your breath and waiting to see what will be, after the stars explode in the night. _

  
  
  
  


**now.**

  
  


Ayeon comes up to the farthest fringes of the crowd just as the band launches into a pulsing, energetic song, their beats falling in time with the fireworks shooting off into the night sky. She pushes her way past the standing bodies, her soft apologies inaudible under the music and the erratic  _ boom boom boom _ . With every boom, the crowd changes color, red-gold-green-blue, and Younghyun hits a soaring note as the sky explodes with colors, lighting up the people’s faces as though a star has come too close to the earth.

Tonight is the boys’ last performance as a band. This is why she’s here—Sungjin asked her to come, for old times’ sake, and she couldn’t bring herself to say no. Otherwise she would have stayed home, watching the fireworks from her rooftop and sipping a glass of wine with her mother. But she’s here instead.

She spots a familiar face in the crowd and weaves her way toward him. It’s Jinyoung, cheering alongside some others she hasn’t seen since high school—Suji, Jaebum, Nayeon. Hyerim, who lives here now, at least for the time being. Ayeon has seen most people come and go.

Suji greets her with a hug and launches into saying something Ayeon can’t hear, so she smiles and nods and watches the fireworks shine back in the eyes of all these one-time friends. Are they friends, now? Ayeon thinks so, but love is a funny thing, difficult to depend on.

Younghyun’s voice draws her attention back to the stage.

Soon Jae will leave the country, and Wonpil will move to Seoul, and the band—the band they’d poured themselves into over the past three years, the band Younghyun and Sungjin and Wonpil had dreamed up back in high school, the band she’d almost been persuaded to join—will no longer exist. She feels like she’s attending a funeral, in some strange way, or a memorial. A bouquet of fireworks lights up overhead.

She looks at Younghyun, smiling as though he has no cares in the world. Like running a finger over the soft and crumpled skin of a scar, she thinks about what it felt like to be in love with him.

  
  
  
  
  


“We had a good run,” Jae says when Hyerim tracks him down after the show, crouched on the concrete as he puts his guitar back in its case. The night is still electric and alive, people’s chattering voices drifting across the streets, lanterns floating in the sky overhead. “‘Bout as good as we could get, I guess.”

Hyerim chews on the straw of her bubble tea and weighs the pros and cons of trying to be direct, for once. Saying what she wants to say instead of swallowing it back down and faking a smile. But he’s talking about the band, and the USA flag sticker on his guitar case is just a reminder of things that can’t happen.

“What are you going to do with the rest of the night?” she asks.

He snaps his guitar case closed, his eyes on his bandmates across the grass. They’re standing in a clump of people who all grew up in this town, went to elementary and middle and high school together. Neither Jae nor Hyerim grew up here, and part of her would like to think this is a bond between them in this moment, for this night, but she isn’t sure.

“I should get drinks with the guys,” he says, tilting a smile up at her.

She starts to think of an excuse, some other made-up plans she doesn’t have, so he won’t feel bad.

But before she gets a chance, he asks, “Are you coming?”

Hyerim says yes, all too aware she’s driving down a dead-end road.

  
  
  
  
  


The bar is crowded and the guy playing guitar at the front sucks. Nayeon could do a hell of a lot better than him, she thinks. Sungjin could accompany her on the guitar. They’d be a real hit, maybe get on the circuit in Busan, or go up to Seoul and release an album. Something idol-lite. Actually, maybe she could start an idol career and keep him around as her live-in song writer—in the alternate universe where he’d actually go for that.

She gets lost, briefly, in this silly fantasy, and fails to notice Sungjin until he sits down next to her at the table and hands her a drink. The remaining band members fall into their own seats, and besides them, half the people from high school Nayeon swore she was never going to talk to again. Jinyoung in his stupid button-down shirt—where the hell does he think he is, anyway?—leaning close to Wonpil, as if he doesn’t think anyone can see he has a crush, or maybe he doesn’t care. When did that start, and how did she miss it? Suji still looks like an idol, sitting on Jinyoung’s other side and texting away like she’d rather be somewhere else. Jae and Younghyun and Hyerim on the far end, talking in English like they’re better than the rest of them. Dowoon tapping a rhythm against his beer, Ayeon next to him and Jaebum on her other side, and then Sungjin. And then Nayeon herself. 

She hates feeling like this. Out of place. She downs her drink in one big gulp, earning shocked approval from Jaebum. Sungjin takes the glass out of her hand.

“I’m not a kid,” she whines, knowing she sounds very much like a kid. Under the table, Sungjin puts his hand on her knee, where no one else can see.

“You cry a lot when you’re drunk,” Sungjin laughs, with a warning under his tone. “And you tell all your secrets.” The way he’s looking at her, she can’t quite figure out. She should look away now.

“Remember when—” Jinyoung says, and launches into a story about high school when the boys had gotten drunk on a high school soccer trip.

Under the table, Nayeon puts her hand over Sungjin’s, and moves his under her skirt. She watches him flush pink when he realizes what she’s doing, but he lets her have her way until his fingers brush the seam of her underwear. Then, laughing at Jinyoung’s story like nothing has happened, he pulls his hand away from hers, his fingertips burning the skin of her thigh.

Nayeon stands up. “I need another drink.”

She doesn’t look back to see if anyone is looking at her.

She veers left and out the door on her way up to the bar, stepping out onto the sidewalk and looking up at the hazy night sky. Sometimes she wants so much, she doesn’t know how to contain it all within herself. Looking up into the night she wishes she could burst like a firework, so bright and unbearable that Sungjin could never look away, and neither could anyone else.

  
  
  
  
  


**yesterday.**

  
  


Just after midnight Ayeon hears a familiar voice, dim but audible, singing in the distance. She freezes with her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth, and stares at her own reflection in the speckled bathroom mirror. The singing drifts up again. She spits in the sink, rinses out her mouth too quickly to get all the toothpaste out, and then rushes out of the apartment in her pajamas and her father’s slippers.

Outside, Younghyun is standing on the sidewalk, swaying on his feet with his arms spread wide as he sings in the direction of her open window on the second floor.

“What are you doing?” she hisses as loudly as she dares. It’s a residential street; every neighbor has known her since she was born. Her eyes dart around, searching for lights flipping on in other windows.

“Ayeon?”

Younghyun turns toward her, looking for all the world like he didn’t expect to see her here. She sighs and folds her arms over her chest, suddenly aware that she’s not wearing a bra. She’d hoped he was less drunk than he apparently is.

“You can’t be here,” she tells him, stepping forward. She grabs him by the arms to keep him from stumbling toward her. “How did you get here?”

“Walked,” he mumbles.

“From where?”

He gestures vaguely in the direction of downtown, which means he’s probably walked thirty minutes to an hour in this state. Sure enough she spots a discarded bottle in a grocery store bag, leaking its contents all over the sidewalk. The smell of alcohol hits her a moment later.

“Younghyun,” she says, sounding like a schoolteacher. “We are  _ broken up _ . You  _ cannot come here _ . Do you understand me?”

“I  _ know _ ,” he insists. He sways forward on his feet, then back, and it takes all her strength to keep him balanced. “I just had to  _ tell you _ —”

She realizes he’s going to vomit a split second before he actually does and manages to maneuver him in the direction of the gutter—an impressive feat considering he’s much larger than her—and she pats his back out of a well-worn affection. She’s tired. She can tell he’s tired, too, but the look in his eyes makes her more frustrated than sympathetic. She wants to throw something at him, or shout into the night, but she can’t.

He straightens back up as best he can. Now he has tears in his eyes, though she doesn’t know whether it’s from throwing up or from his emotions or both.

“You have to leave,” Ayeon repeats. She’s halfway considering calling the cops if he refuses—he’s not really a danger to anyone but himself but she’s just so fucking tired of bearing the weight of his pain that she really can’t muster up the energy to care about the consequences he’d have to deal with once he sobers up.

But he closes his eyes and nods. Then he turns and walks a short ways down the sidewalk, where he sits down on the dry side of his now-empty bottle, and rests his head on his knees.

She considers going back upstairs—what she should do, really—but with a sigh, she pulls her phone out of the pocket of her shorts and sends a text, then goes to sit down next to Younghyun.

“I asked Sungjin to come pick you up,” she says.

He makes some sound in his throat, acknowledgment and not much else. She sighs. He’s in a bad way. It’s not like she didn’t expect this, but it still feels strange seeing him like this. Tongyeong is small enough that she hears things, stories about who he’s dating now, what he does on his weekends, but it never makes her jealous, because  _ this _ is the Younghyun who always ends up outside her door. Sad and scared and alone.

She reaches out and brushes back the hair behind his ear, combing her fingers gently through the dark strands. “You’re going to be okay, Younghyun.”

“I’m not okay.”

“I know,” she says.

  
  
  
  
  


In high school, he treated her like he’d popped right out of a drama. He came back from Canada and the Younghyun she’d grown up with was replaced with this confident, charming idiot who showed up at her door with flowers, wrote songs with her name as the title and performed them at their school’s closing ceremony, took her to the beach and promised to take her all over the world. How could she have said no to him? At the time, she only wondered why he’d picked her, out of all the other girls.

“Because I like you,” he’d said, without any hint of uncertainty.

He was like that. He kissed her like he knew what he was doing and only revealed years later that he’d never shared more than a peck with anyone before her. Throughout their college years he took her on romantic vacations to Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong on his meager part-time salary and the money his father gave him for books. (He persuaded his seniors to loan him theirs and copied theirs by hand, word-for-word, for four years. Later, he credited his 4.0 to this.) He came back to live in Tongyeong because she wanted to care for her ailing father. He loved her—she never doubted that.

So, imagine. Imagine having all that.

After all those years spent with him, Ayeon woke up and realized his world revolved around her, and everything she was had burned up when she became someone else’s sun. She broke up with him, moved in with her parents, and moved on.

Is moving on.

  
  
  
  
  


Sungjin arrives ten minutes after Ayeon texted him, which must be a testament to their enduring friendship, she thinks. They exchange glances as he pushes down the kickstand of his motorbike, and his gaze changes to disappointment as they drift to Younghyun, now lying on his back on the sidewalk, one arm over his eyes.

“Wake up, idiot,” Sungjin says, nudging Younghyun with his toe.

“Hyung,” Younghyun groans.

Sungjin looks at Ayeon again. She wraps her arms around herself and rolls her eyes, trying to muster up some kind of emotion. Anger, maybe, or sadness. She just feels numb.

Sungjin tries to lift Younghyun but he’s dead weight. He flops over onto his side and Sungjin steps back into the bottle. It lets out a loud  _ crack _ , and shatters into sharp fragments.

“Shit,” Sungjin says. He’s wearing sandals, and now his heel is bleeding.

Younghyun blinks at the blood seeping out of Sungjin’s heel. “Sorry,” he says, and then Ayeon watches a tear leak out of his eye and into his hairline.

“I always have to clean up after you,” Sungjin says.

Ayeon takes a step backwards. This is her problem; it always has been. She can’t walk away. She can’t just let things be what they are. It’s how she got stuck in a relationship for six years. It’s why she doesn’t know who she is anymore.

She’s back upstairs before she realizes what she’s doing. She closes the front door behind her, absently worried about Sungjin’s bleeding foot and Younghyun on the sidewalk crying his heart out, but it doesn’t matter. 

“It’s not your responsibility,” she says aloud. 

It doesn’t matter anymore.

  
  
  
  
  


Nayeon sits in the semi-dark, waiting, with nothing for company but the light of her phone. She keeps scrolling through it, looking at pictures of her friends off having the  _ best _ time, so totally  _ happy _ —and really, fuck them. But she can’t stop looking at them. Jeongyeon and Momo are at Disney World, holding hands and posing in matching Minnie Mouse hats. Jihyo is in New York City, posting pictures of fancy food and gritty city streets. Mina just joined a ballet company and she keeps posting like she’s really something special. And yeah, just—fuck that.

The light comes on. The door opens. Sungjin comes into the room. He doesn’t look surprised to see her, but he doesn’t look excited, either. Nayeon resists the urge to throw her phone against the wall.

He closes the door softly, without making a sound. His parents’ room is across the house but he still worries about noise and makes Nayeon sneak in through the window when she comes over. One time he fucked her against the interior wall of his room and she had to bite into his shoulder the whole time just to keep from making a sound. Sometimes she wishes  _ they _ could go to Disney World, but he won’t marry her and she’s not sure she wants to marry him except in the abstract sense where it would be a huge relief to just mindlessly follow the pattern she’s expected to follow in life and—anyway, his parents aren’t the type to approve him taking a girl off on vacation without marrying her, at least eventually. So she sneaks in.

The weird part is she should mind it a lot more than she does.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “Younghyun got drunk and went to Ayeon’s house, so I had to go get him and take him home, and I got this cut in my foot.” He holds up his foot and shows her a bandage wrapped and taped around his ankle.

“Is he okay? Are  _ you _ okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. It wasn’t bad. Just time-consuming.”

She watches as he takes his keys out of his pocket and stands there staring at the table like he’s expecting to figure out the secrets of life or something if he can just wait long enough. As for her, she’s tired and horny and left teetering on the edge of unhappiness after all that scrolling, but mostly horny, and this is why she throws a pillow at his head.

“Hey!” He looks up at her, his eyes wide with shock and indignance. Somewhere in the back of her mind she figures she should be asking him what is wrong, but it’s not like he ever gives a real answer.

They stare at each other, the moment growing thick with a tension she doesn’t fully understand. An apology is on the tip of her tongue when he lets out a quiet laugh of disbelief. She laughs, too. When he crosses the room and kisses her, she kisses back a little too hard, as if the force of her body against his could change his heart.

  
  
  
  
  


The first time she and Sungjin had sex was also her first time ever, the summer after her second year in university. She was home for the summer with too much free time to contemplate all the ways she was wasting her life. So it was partially out of boredom, but mostly out of a fear of being the last virgin among her friends, that she propositioned Sungjin on a sultry afternoon in the beginning of July.

She remembers it so clearly—it seems like this is the sort of thing most people forget, letting it drift into some obscure corner of the brain and remembered in hazy snippets, but not her. They were lying in the grass down by the ocean, watching fluffy white clouds float by overhead as they sipped at cold beers Sungjin had brought in a plastic grocery bag. He was getting ready to go into his last year of university, and probably should have been out on an internship, but—ever the filial son—he was home, helping out with the family restaurant. The two of them were old friends; they’d never dated and she’d never had more than a latent, unexamined crush. 

He said, “I’m so bored. There’s nothing to do.” 

And she said, “We could have sex.”

He actually choked on his beer, sputtering and wheezing for a good minute, and he was still red in the face when he managed to look her in the eye and squeeze a small “What?” out of his throat.

She shrugged and tossed her hair over her shoulder in a way she hoped was attractive. “What? Are you a virgin?”

He blushed. “Only technically.”

She snorted. “Well, I’m completely technically, and it seems like a waste to wait around forever.”

One of his eyebrows lifted. “I feel so special.”

He was teasing and he wasn’t; she heard it, and listened to the sound of rushing waves, his still-wheezing breath, tourists laughing in the distance. 

“Well,” she said quietly. “I trust you.”

It took a few more days to persuade him it was a good idea—and honestly if he’d been too eager, she would have second-guessed herself, but as it was, he presented a challenge and she was like a goat butting its head against a supposedly immovable wall. She kissed him outside his house when the sun was low one night, and since they’d made out a couple of times in high school she had a pretty good idea of what to do to leave him thinking about her when he reached under the waistband of his pajamas in the middle of the night. A few days later she kissed him again and this time he slid his hands under her shirt, which seemed like a victory, but it was still another week before they went out to eat and she looked in his wallet when he went to the bathroom and found a condom inside, its wrapper shiny and new. After that, she was patient. 

Another week passed and then he finally kissed her down by the ocean late in the evening, his mouth hot and velvet against hers, and then she knew it was going to happen, right there outside, the sky blue with dusk and the shadows wrapped around them.

He was almost frustratingly gentle, punctuating every movement with “Is this okay?” until she told him to shut up—and while it wasn’t at all like she’d been led to believe by Sana’s florid descriptions and Jeongyeon’s clipped explanations, she was still taken aback by the desire that swelled in her, shaking her from head to toe. No one had ever told her about that.

The rest of the summer was spent sneaking into secret places, and any time he asked “So what are we?” she kissed him until he forgot to wait for an answer.

She never told any of her friends about it. When she got back to university in the fall, Jeongyeon had dumped her on-and-off again boyfriend Jimin and concluded she was gay, and proceeded to enter into a brief but intense “I-hate-men” phase. During that time it never seemed appropriate to say  _ So this summer I talked my high school senior into having sex with me and we did it pretty much every day _ , and then when the phase was over it felt somehow embarrassing to bring it up. Her friends were much more sophisticated and worldly than she, despite being younger, and she felt a little ashamed to admit any of her own relatively tame exploits (even if she invented fictitious experiences without so much as a blush any time they asked). And it was only in the summers, anyway. (Except that one time in Seoul, in Jaebum’s apartment when he was away on a job interview, and it was a late winter afternoon and she went in insisting to herself that she didn’t care, didn’t care, this wasn’t really a thing, but all she could think about the whole time she was there was how Sungjin’s laugh kept giving her this weird painful stab in her chest like she would do anything to get that laugh out of him again, but no—she didn’t care, and they were just friends.)

If anyone else had ever found out, she would have heard by now—it’s not like Dowoon knows how to keep secrets. And anyway, it will have to end soon. At the end of the summer she’ll go back to Seoul, since there’s no work for her in this town, and Sungjin will stay here, managing the family business. Eventually he’ll marry some other girl and have two boring children and rarely touch his wife, and she’ll have at least three boyfriends who don’t treat her right before she finally marries the richest one and puts on a facade of happiness for the rest of her life. And maybe sometimes she’ll think back to this, fucking as quietly as possible in the middle of a summer night, and wonder if she made the right choice.

  
  
  
  
  


Most nights, she leaves as soon as they’re done. But this night he keeps his arm around her, his breath hot against her neck and his eyes half-closed with exhaustion, while he twists a lock of her hair around his fingers.

A long time ago, they’d been able to talk for hours on end. He was her best conversation partner, and if the other kids at school thought it was weird she went skateboarding with a guy two years her senior every evening, she waved it away with “fine, keep up if you can.” They were part of a group: Jaebum thought she was annoying, Jinyoung thought she was frivolous, Younghyun flirted with her until he got together with Ayeon, Wonpil told her the silliest puns and laughed until she laughed too, and Suji took to linking their arms together when they all walked home at night, an aura of protective benevolence like a halo over her perfect head. But it was Sungjin who was her real friend. Even after all this started, she still thought of him as her friend.

Now, though. He doesn’t really talk anymore. Not to her, or anyone else, and she doesn’t know why, and she’s too afraid to ask.

She moves to sit up. Outside the window she can see the thin gray light of dawn on the horizon. The rain has cleared, leaving behind a cloudless starry sky.

“Stay,” he says.

She looks back at him. He looks small and vulnerable in the dim light, and almost without quite realizing what she’s doing, she runs her fingers over his cheek.

She stays until the sky turns a rosy pink and he’s fallen asleep.

  
  
  
  
  


**today.**

  
  


“That’s it.”

Jae surveys his two suitcases, backpack, and carry-on in disbelief. He’s got dark circles under his eyes and Hyerim is pretty sure he’s lost weight since the last time she came by a couple weeks ago, judging by the hollows of his cheeks. But he nods at his finished project, apparently satisfied. Behind him, a dozen cardboard boxes wait in haphazard stacks for him to cart them off to other people’s houses, debris of the life he’s about to leave behind. In two weeks his visa will expire, but he’ll be gone before then, and this is all he will take with him.

“How do you feel?” Hyerim asks, trying to smile. He grins back at her, and pushes his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose.

“Um,” he says, blinking at the luggage. “Closure, I think.”

Hyerim feels her heart bottom out. “That’s good,” she says brightly.

  
  
  
  
  


Jae inherited the house from his grandmother simply because he was the only relative in Korea who cared to take it. For the past few years he’s lived here, trying to make ends meet, only to have to sell it to a developer who will almost certainly demolish it within the month.

Hyerim doesn’t remember the house seeming so run-down and faded, but now the old walls creak in the wind, and despite the summer heat outside, the place is fairly cool. Every step Hyerim takes echoes in the empty rooms. When they were teenagers, bored on their summer holidays, she and Jae used to sit on the threadbare couch in the back room watching cartoons and eating ice pops from the corner store. She can still see the lighter square in the wood floor where the couch had sat all those years. She turns slowly in the room, trying to impress it in her memory.

They’d kissed out behind the house, when they were fifteen and curious. She can see the place outside the square window, up there on the grassy hill. It happened once, but she can’t remember anymore what happened after, only that it didn’t happen again. Had they been embarrassed? Scared? She can’t remember. It seems like it happened so long ago, to a different Hyerim.

“Hey,” Jae says, walking into the room behind her. He looks at her, follows her line of sight to the tree out the window, and then seems to curl around himself, his shoulders hunching as he sticks his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “Do you want to get something to eat?” he says with a gentle smile. 

She wonders if he remembers.

“Yeah,” she agrees. That’s the trouble with being friends with someone for so long, years and moments of your lives weaving in and out of each other’s. You don’t know what the other remembers. Don’t know what you can ask. Don’t know what you can talk about without disrupting the fragile version of yourselves you’ve decided you can live with.

  
  
  
  
  


They take his uncle’s ancient motorbike out of the shed and Hyerim climbs on behind Jae, balancing herself with her hands on his shoulders. There’s no plastic handlebar along the back to hold onto and no footrest for the passenger, so she wordlessly curls her arms around his waist and hugs her knees against his thighs, ostensibly to keep from flying off as they wind down the mountain paths. A year ago she wouldn’t have been here—she would have been in Seoul, in the passenger seat of Nichkhun’s fancy car—for the life of her she can’t remember what kind of car it was, though he talked about it often enough. A year ago she would have been wearing a dress and perfect makeup instead of a ratty pair of jean shorts and a T-shirt she pulled out of one of the cardboard boxes stacked in Jae’s living room. A year ago she couldn’t have fathomed leaving Seoul. Now that version of herself seems as far away as the sixteen-year-old Hyerim, both of them like strangers she’s trying to acquaint herself with.

Jae drives cautiously, gripping the handbrakes, dodging cats basking in the sun. She can feel him breathing, his rib cage jutting up against her arms. There’s the scent of rain in the air, and she feels like the past is bleeding through to the present, sitting here this close to him with the promise of rain to come. She should have turned him down when he asked her to help him pack up the house, but he’d sounded so desperate in his messages.  _ Everyone else is too busy. I don’t know who else to ask. _ It’s not like she has anything better to do. Even if she did, she suspects she would have said yes.

They pull into the small parking area in front of the Park family restaurant, a noodle shop on a busy street. Sungjin stands just inside the front room kitchen area, stirring a large pot. “You still owe me!” he yells as Jae walks in the door.

“I paid for your drinks at the last show, so it should be even—” Jae protests.

“Don’t you dare leave this country without paying up!”

Even Hyerim can tell that Sungjin isn’t really angry, though he might be serious. Jae pulls a wad of cash out of his pocket and asks her what she wants. She answers something, less aware of what’s happening in the moment than the sensation of it, the chill air conditioner blowing overhead and the scent of spicy soup and the sweat dripping along her hairline. She wants to remember this.

“Hyerim-nuna!”

She turns just as Wonpil appears from the back and catapults himself forward, pulling her into a hug.

“I saw you literally last week,” she laughs as he steps back.

His eyes dart from her to Jae and back to her, curious, but she keeps her expression neutral, unwilling to reveal what isn’t even there to be found.

“I’m not ready for goodbyes yet,” Wonpil says.

  
  
  
  
  


She’d spent her summers in Tongyeong for as long as she can remember, flying from Hong Kong after the school year finished and setting up for the summer in her aunt’s house up on the hillside, near Jae’s grandmother’s place. In the early years her whole family came; later, it was sometimes just her, sent back to study Korean in the stuffy upstairs room of a hagwon with a teacher who seemed perpetually confused by her unplanned summer program for a hodgepodge of kids growing up overseas. Every year she asked them—Hyerim, Jae, Bernard, Younghyun during middle school—why they didn’t just go up to Seoul, but there were always reasons enough to stay. Somehow those summers seemed carved out and set aside, something special and secret. She didn’t talk about it much when she went home, unable to find a way to reconcile the hot summer evenings she’d spent swimming in the river in the mountains with the frenetic pulse of Hong Kong life. During the school year she worried about grades and popularity and her clothing size; during the summers she worried about whether her aunt would notice if she took the motorbike out after dusk.

After the break-up she’d moved here to stay with her aunt, because her mother thought it would be better than returning to Hong Kong, where no one ever stands still long enough to start over. She teaches English at the local cram school alongside her old Korean teacher, whose hair has grayed at the temples, and who seems far kinder than Hyerim remembers. She collects eggs each morning from her aunt’s chickens. She hasn’t looked at her social media in weeks.

But when they return to Jae’s house, she opens her Facebook surreptitiously on her phone, just to scroll back through her pictures until she finds the one she’s looking for, five years ago outside Sungjin’s house. It was the same day Jae asked her out and she rejected him, insisting that they weren’t right for each other, even if he was going to live in Korea for good. Six months after that, she slept with Nichkhun when he was fresh out of a relationship, and proceeded to waste the next three years trying to be someone good enough for glamorous life she’d craved.

In the picture, Jae’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and she’s standing on the other end of the circle, leaning against Younghyun. Sometimes she wonders how things might have turned out differently. If you can really back up to a fork in the road, and take a different path.

  
  
  
  
  


They drive up the mountainside to meet the others in the afternoon, dressed in their swimsuits and old T-shirts. The river cuts a course through the mountainside and down to the ocean glimmering in the distance. Up this high, the air is cool and the water cooler, lush trees lining the riverside. Water pours from a small waterfall to the left of where they park the motorbike. Down in the ravine, the others are already swimming through the dark, clear water.

“When was the last time you were up here?” Jae asks, shouldering his backpack. “The summer after we graduated?”

“Summer after we graduated  _ high school _ ,” Hyerim answers.

“That long?”

He instinctively reaches back to hold out a hand as she traverses the slick, rocky slope in flip flops, and she shouldn’t really take note of this—because anyone would have done the same—but she does. It’s comfortable, being here with him, all these years later. Like finding something you’d thought you lost.

“I didn’t really have a reason to come up here,” she explains. “I wasn’t going to just come by myself.”

“I do sometimes.” He grins back at her, and holds up a tree branch for her to slide under. “It’s peaceful.”

“Not everyone is you, Jae.” She says it teasingly but means it, too. Not everyone is Jae—not everyone can think themselves into pretzels of anxiety. Not everyone can maintain a positive, hopeful demeanor with deportation looming in the distance, either.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says.

They emerge from the trees and at the riverside atop a huge rock which juts into the water. Everyone shouts as they walk out, and Hyerim takes a moment to figure out who is here. Jae’s whole band—Sungjin basking in the sun on a wide flat rock in the distance, Younghyun treading water in one of the dark pools, Wonpil and Dowoon and Ayeon staring into the water at whatever is beneath their feet. Besides them, she recognizes some of the others—Jinyoung taking photos for Suji over at the drop-off, Nayeon next to Sungjin, her face hidden behind large sunglasses. There are a few others she doesn’t recognize, too—a couple of guys talking in English on the opposite bank. She wishes it were as quiet as when they used to come up here during the summer.

“You gonna jump?” Jae asks.

She used to jump off this rock every time they came up here. But it didn’t seem nearly so high up, back then, when she was younger and dumber. She shakes her head.

“Okay.” Jae looks curious, but he gestures toward the clearest path down to the river, and she takes it, glancing back at the rock only once, wondering if she should have jumped.

  
  
  
  
  


Ayeon watches Jae and Hyerim make their way into the water and breaks away from where Wonpil and Dowoon are yelling about the fish biting their feet (as if the fish haven’t always been here, every time they’ve come up here for the past twenty-plus years). She pushes through the water and grins at Jae, thinking back to the summer talent show where they’d met.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving!” she says, giving him a quick hug. “Your Korean almost doesn’t suck anymore.”

Jae narrows his eyes at her. “Just because I make spelling mistakes doesn’t mean you can’t guess—”

“I can’t,” Ayeon says to Hyerim, and tries not to smile. She looks between them, trying to discern if there’s something there to be noted. Jae had asked her to help him ask Hyerim out, years and years ago, but nothing had come of it. Yet here they are, turning up together. Hyerim smiles and looks at her feet in the water. Ayeon looks back at Jae, who shrugs, and shakes his head, as if warning her not to ask.

They go to greet Sungjin on the other end of the pool, leaving Ayeon to drift toward a sunny rock, taking in deep gulps of fresh mountain air. Younghyun has been keeping his distance from her since she arrived, probably ashamed of his drunken escapade the night before. She keeps him in the corner of her eye, and wills him not to talk to her, at least not in front of everyone. She’s not sure what she’d say if he did.

After a few minutes, Jae goes to swim under the waterfall and Hyerim comes to join Ayeon on the rock. “Mind if I join you?” she asks.

Ayeon moves over to make room for her. They’d never really been friends, and never been not-friends. It was just that Hyerim only turned up for the summers, and she was fairly shy back then. Ayeon turns to her with a kind smile.

“So you and Jae?” she asks.

For a moment Hyerim says nothing, the sounds of the others splashing and laughing filling in the silence.

“It’s not really a thing,” Hyerim says. She pushes her hair back and out of her eyes.

Ayeon leans back on her hands. “Jae’s good at hard conversations but bad at initiating them.”

Hyerim snorts, and wraps her arms around her knees. “He’s leaving. So.”

“Yeah.” 

Ayeon looks out at the others. The connections between them all have held firm over all these years, and she isn’t sure if that’s a good thing or not. She isn’t sure why she’s up here, keeping her distance from Younghyun and feeling guilty for it, when she could be anywhere in the whole wide world. Maybe  _ home _ is a magnetic field pulling you back to it, more than anything else.

“Do you remember when Jae and I were in that talent show?” Ayeon asks.

“With Jimin?” Hyerim finally cracks a smile. “The one where you guys made Jae cover ‘Toxic’ on a dare and he actually did it?”

“That was a great year,” Ayeon says, laughing. 

Across the pool, Jaebum and Jinyoung look to be organizing a chicken fight game. Nayeon climbs onto Sungjin’s shoulders without hesitation, which gives Ayeon an odd pause, as she considers how Sungjin’s hands spread across Nayeon’s thighs without hesitation. 

She looks away, and decides not to comment on it. It’s probably nothing. She looks at Hyerim again.

“You know what my plan was?” She laughs to herself, thinking about it. “I was going to win that talent show, and there was going to be someone from a record label there, and they’d offer me a contract and I’d go to Seoul and be in the next Wonder Girls.”

Hyerim laughs. “Didn’t we all want to join the Wonder Girls?” She grins at Ayeon. “Why didn’t you do it, though? You were good enough.”

Ayeon looks at the others again. Younghyun climbs onto Sungjin’s shoulders, his wide smile glittering across the distance. She shrugs.

“There was always a reason not to go,” she says.

The game continues in the distance. Ayeon watches Nayeon break away from the group and make her way through the water and over to them. Her toothy grin is visible long before she gets close. Ayeon had never been close with Nayeon, either, put off by her demeanor and the insincere way she welcomed her into the group of friends. But now that she’s older, Ayeon has a better idea of what it must have felt like, to be a high schooler watching a new girl come into your group.

“You guys aren’t going to play?” Nayeon asks, cheery and bright. She points a thumb over her shoulder at the others.

Hyerim crinkles her nose. “Maybe not today.”

Nayeon seats herself next to them, dripping water all over the warm rock. She frowns at the group still wrestling, idly twisting a strand of hair around her finger.

“What are your plans, Nayeon?” Ayeon asks, offering a smile. “I heard you just finished university.”

Nayeon frowns. “I don’t know,” she says. “My dad keeps asking me that.”

Ayeon opens her mouth, trying to think of another question, but Nayeon cuts her off.

“Do you ever feel like,” she begins, “Like, you had this whole idea of what your life would be like, and then you get to that point in life and you’ve got something entirely different than what you wanted, and you just don’t know how to feel about it, or where you went wrong?”

Ayeon closes her mouth, more than a little shocked to hear this coming out of Nayeon’s mouth.

“All the time,” Hyerim says.

  
  
  
  
  


After a couple of hours in the sun, the group is exhausted. Nayeon is pretty sure she’s got a sunburn, but she doesn’t want to move from the rock where she’s lying half-asleep. She hears the others talking somewhere nearby but doesn’t open her eyes. Suji offers to drop Nayeon off. “I have to go that way,” Sungjin says. “I don’t mind driving by Nayeon’s house.”

With a sigh, Nayeon rubs her eyes and gets up. The others are all dressed and standing around the rocky river bank. Nayeon scrambles over to them, grabbing her things and climbing out of the ravine and then into the passenger seat of Sungjin’s car, where she flips on the radio, trying to find something to structure her thoughts.

Of course, he doesn’t drive to her house.

He veers off course as soon as they are out of sight of the river, winding along worn mountain roads, climbing higher and higher into the sun. Some old songs hum out of the radio, the kind of things their parents would have jammed to, the melodies outdated and wheezing. She watches his fingers tap against the steering wheel. Watches his face, the slant of his eyes, the way he clenches his jaw. Her heart gives a painful twinge.

She is given to excess: she is too much. She can fake her way through life as a prim goody two-shoes but she cannot seem to trim her emotions down to size. She already knows.

He turns and there before them spreads the whole valley, white buildings dotting the coastline, the ocean glittering in the distance. She gasps when she sees it.

“You’ve never been up here?” he asks, laughing at her. He puts the car in park and she tries to drink it all in.

“Who was going to take me?” She rips her eyes away from the view to glare at him, but he’s still laughing, smiling in a way that stabs right through her. If she could have  _ this _ Sungjin all the time—or some of the time—she could make due with some of the time—everything would be different.

His smile softens until he’s not smiling at all. His fingers are running along the soft skin of her wrist, although she doesn’t know when he moved to touch her. The radio turns to a commercial. She’s already forgotten about the view.

“What are we?” she asks.

She only realizes she’s asked after she’s already said it, and it’s too late to take the words back. But now that she’s asked, she feels like the words are ripping right through her chest. She’ll die if he doesn’t answer. She’ll die if he answers. Her body feels strange and she looks at his hand on her wrist, his fingers still and hers trembling, like they belong to someone else and she’s just observing, ready to float away after she hears his words.

“What do you want to be?” He speaks softly. The radio changes back to another old song. She can’t bring herself to look at him.

In a careful, somehow graceful movement, she pushes herself across the gear shift and into his lap. With her eyes closed, she can manage at least the language of touch—she kisses him softly at first, then moving deeper, her mind electrified by the warmth of his mouth and the way his calloused palms feel against her thighs. It all feels different than it has ever felt. The air sits heavy and still around them, and in spite of the radio, everything is too quiet. She reaches for the button of his pants.

Later, now shaking, she leans back against the steering wheel and looks out the window as a flock of birds take flight from the trees, their black bodies silhouetted against the hazy blue sky. Sungjin collapses against her, pressing lazy kisses against her collarbone, the skin on his back glistening with sweat. “I love you,” he murmurs.

She freezes with her fingers in his hair. She doesn’t believe him, not really—because. Because he wants her but doesn’t seem to need her. Because she’s still terrified by the way her body responds to him, burning out of control. Because love has consequences. Because she’s not sure if she’ll ever be enough.

  
  
  
  


After piling up seven people in Suji’s five-seat car, the beachside feels like a welcome relief. Ayeon sits on one of the steps built into the hillside, her bathing suit still damp under her clothes, and watches the others conduct a second photoshoot below her, the ocean their picturesque backdrop. She knows Younghyun is behind her, somewhere. He went off to buy water for everyone and has yet to return, but he’s going to come talk to her when he does. She can feel it coming, and doesn’t know what she’s going to say.

Sure enough, a few minutes later he sits down next to her and hands her a chilled bottle of water. “Reminds me of our high school graduation,” he says, nodding at the others.

“High school would have been more interesting with—what was that guy’s name?”

“Jackson.”

Ayeon looks at the man in question turning a flip in the background of a photo. “Definitely would have been interesting.”

They sit quietly for a few moments. Ayeon sips from the bottle and wipes its cool condensation against her neck.

Right on cue, Younghyun sighs and turns toward her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone to your house last night. I was wrong.”

“Mm,” she acknowledges, lifting her eyebrows at him. She’s amused out of habit, but somewhere underneath her haze of emotions is a hard center of certainty that he should not have gone to her house, should not be forgiven too easily.

“I’m still just trying to adjust,” he says. He focuses on her while he talks, intent and serious, exactly as he’s always been.

“It’s been months, you know.”

“We were together for  _ years _ .” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I can’t just—stop—”

He doesn’t continue, but she knows where this speech goes. Can’t stop loving her. Can’t stop missing her. What kind of person is she, that she doesn’t particularly want to love again, if it means becoming so embedded in another person that she can’t dig herself out?

“I know,” is what she says. She reaches out and puts her hand over his, because she knows him—a touch is as effective as an apology. A song is as good as a promise. A gift is the same as  _ I love you. _ She knows.

“You really meant it?” he asks.

She notes his change in tone, and it draws her attention back from the group and onto him. He stares back at her, unguarded, his hair blowing gently in the wind.

“Meant what?”

“What you said about—everything. Why you couldn’t be with me anymore.”

He’s really asking. She stares at him, for a long moment, her mouth dry.

“I really meant it,” she says.

He winces, and nods. “Okay.”

And then he stands up and walks away.

Watching the lines of his back, she heaves a deep sigh. Relieved, maybe, or sad. Something seems to have shifted out of place, and for the first time she wonders what it would be like to actually say goodbye.

  
  
  
  
  


The rain clouds roll down from the mountains in a stretched-out yawn. First the clouds, and then the hush of rain on the roof. Hyerim had intended to pick up her bag left behind at Jae’s house and return to her own home, but now she doesn’t really want to drive anywhere.

“Just wait the rain out here,” Jae offers.

She agrees, standing in his doorway and watching drops spatter the concrete path, then grow more numerous, into a veritable downpour. She wonders what might have happened, if she hadn’t been so intent on moving up to Seoul all those years ago. She wonders what might have happened, if she hadn’t met Nichkhun.

She met Nichkhun because she was living with Sunye, right after she moved to Seoul, and Sunye and Nichkhun were friends because of Tiffany, who had just dumped him. For some reason Hyerim never figured out, Nichkhun got Sunye in the break-up, and spent hours sitting at their kitchen table, drowning his sorrows in Sunye’s too-spicy kimchi-jjigae.

He was exactly what Hyerim had dreamed up for herself: a handsome, well-traveled, multi-lingual, self-made man. He was on the way up in his company and losing his girlfriend took the confidence right out of him, which maybe was why he took interest in Hyerim in the first place. She wasn’t really pretty enough or accomplished enough to stand beside him without seeming out of place, but she wanted him so badly, and he didn’t want to be alone.

When she thinks about him, she thinks about the same moments over and over again. There were so many other moments, good memories within grasp, but she hits replay on the moments she wishes she could just wipe away. Going to a restaurant with him and his friends and sitting in silence while they laughed at inside jokes, and blaming herself for not being able to join in. Late nights by herself, waiting for him to come home. Blaming herself for his not wanting to.

In the end, the final straw was when he asked her to move to Australia with him, and she realized that she couldn’t. She couldn’t remake herself into the version of herself that he wanted, trimming her goals down to match his. And it wasn’t even like he ever asked her to do that. She did it all on her own.

This is what she thinks about, standing inside the doorway of Jae’s empty house. She thinks about the girl that left Seoul a year ago, wishing she could go back and tell her that just because you salvage the pieces of your heart that are left, doesn’t mean anything else comes into fill the empty space. You just hold the pieces together as tightly as you can. And you move forward.

  
  
  
  


She finds Jae in his bedroom, sitting on his bed—the last remaining piece of furniture in the house. He’s frowning at the ceiling when she walks in the room. She spots a bloom of a leak in the top corner.

“Not my problem anymore,” he says with a shrug and a smile, the gesture of someone who has yet to let go. She runs her tongue across her teeth, thinking about what she should do now. There’s a buzz in the room, a low hum just below their words, as if she is walking through a dream. An uncomfortable pull in her stomach.

She sucks in her breath, and then takes the few steps to cross the room, and sits down a few inches away from him. Not close enough to touch, but close enough to sense him beside her. She looks at his tanned and freckled arm. A grisly cut stretches across his forearm where he’d dropped a box and lost a fight to a pissed-off curtain rod—exactly how he described it—but it’s started to heal now. They sit in silence, close but not speaking, listening to the rain.

“So what are you going to do now?” Jae asks.

“Now that you’re gone?” she teases without thinking.

He blushes and blinks rapidly, holding up his hands. “I didn’t mean—”

“I don’t know,” she cuts him off. She doesn’t really know how to tell him that he’s right, that once he’s gone she has to take a different path, another fork in the road. Right now she is standing still, waiting to see whether fate will deal its final blow. She grins at him. “I mean, it’s going to be really boring when I don’t have you calling me to come kill a cockroach for you—”

“First of all, that was  _ one time _ , and second of all, you agreed that that was the most unnaturally gargantuan cockroach you had ever seen. I was calling you for back up.”

She smiles so wide she wonders if he really can’t tell what she’s thinking all the time, and if he can, why he doesn’t do anything about it. Of course, there’s nothing to be done.

“You know,” Jae says, shifting toward her. “We never really talked about—I don’t know, what you’re going through?”

She freezes, thinking about how she’d moved back to this town and found Jae living here and didn’t know how to talk about her break-up. Because it hurt too much, or because she was afraid of what he would think, or something. “What do you want to know?” she asks.

He looks at her, uncertain. “Are you happy now?”

She sighs. “Sometimes,” she says, surprising even herself with the truth.

Sometimes, happiness cuts through her chest like a beam of light—today up at the riverside, she stood there looking at the mountains around her and felt so happy her whole body ached. A few nights ago, Jae drove her home after she went to see his show in Busan and they laughed for the whole drive, talking about everything and nothing, pretending he wasn’t about to leave.

His eyes seem luminous in the gray light streaming through the window. “You know, if you ever come out to LA, you can definitely stay with me. I’ll show you around, and—”

“Jae,” she says, and kisses him.

It’s different than she expected, totally unlike kissing him when they were teenagers. They move toward each other in unison, pushing into the kiss in the same steady rhythm as the rain falling overhead.

After a few moments he breaks away from her, leaning back with a small smile on his face, his brows creased in confusion. “What—”

“I like you,” she says, unable to stop herself. “I know it’s a terrible time to tell you.”

His smile grows. “You know I’ve liked you since—since a long time ago, right? Any time—any time is the perfect time to tell me.”

She laughs at him, and then he kisses her again.

And even though nothing can come of it, for a little while, she forgets to be unhappy.

  
  
  
  


**tomorrow.**

  
  


Nayeon is fairly drunk when they leave the bar to drive down to the ocean. Everything takes on a fuzzy, bluish haze. She waves goodbye to Suji and stumbles into Jinyoung’s motorcycle. He sets her right, maybe while laughing at her, and she stumbles back into someone else. She expects it to be Sungjin, but when she looks up it’s Wonpil, and in her state she can’t stop the words from slipping out, “you’re not Sungjin.”

“No,” Wonpil says, with what might be a condescending smile. “Were you looking for him?”

She hesitates for a few beats too long. “No,” she says, and latches onto his arm, instead.

He helps her into the backseat of Hyerim’s car and she spends the drive with her head against the window, looking out at the passing lights as the others’ flowing English washes over her, like something out of a dream.

She wakes up alone in the car, under a spread of stars. She blinks her bleary eyes and the stars come into focus—some of the brightest ones are actually ships in the distance, traveling across the black water. She opens the door, and falls out of the car.

“You’re awake.”

She sits back on the concrete, her head against the hard body of the car, and looks up. Sungjin sits on the low wall surrounding the parking lot, his hands folded in front of him, watching her.

“What are you doing?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Waiting for you to wake up. I didn’t think it was safe to just leave you alone.”

She closes her eyes and leans her head back against the car. Fuck Sungjin and his unreadable thoughts. Fuck him and the last four years of never knowing where to draw the lines. Fuck him for saying “I love you” like he knows what the words mean. And she’s such an idiot, too, wanting to hear him say it again.

“Help me up,” she tells him, and he does, half-carrying her with an arm around her waist. They shuffle forward, away from the parking lot and into the sand, and it occurs to her that she might always be like this with him, trying to find her footing on shifting sand, but pushing forward anyway, toward the promise of an ocean in the invisible distance.

  
  
  
  


At dawn they are all still together, the whole group of them, sitting on the front porch of Jae’s empty house. His luggage sits in the gravel driveway, dark odd lumps in the pale morning blue, waiting to be put into the taxi that will soon arrive. Hyerim is sitting close enough to Jae that she could reach out and hold his hand, if she were brave enough to try.

“Are you going to come back to visit?” Dowoon asks. His voice has an odd ringing sound; no one has spoken in a long while.

Hyerim watches Jae blink several times in quick succession. “Of course,” he says, and he sounds like he’s telling the truth.

“And we’ll go visit you,” Wonpil says, coming over to drape his arms around Jae’s shoulders, an unsolicited but probably welcome gesture of affection. Jae pushes him off, anyway, and Hyerim can see his eyes glittering in the morning light.

“I don’t have enough money to host you,” Jae retorts. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes and pretends to yawn. Hyerim imagines him in California, walking along the smooth white sands, framed by palm trees. It seems so far away, and she will be here, living a life that’s very different from what she thought she’d have. Sometimes she wonders if she should try to give up wanting altogether, as it only seems to hurt.

“The taxi won’t be here for a while,” Ayeon announces, drawing the attention of the whole group. “Let’s go watch the sunrise.”

Without protest the group stands and meanders to the other side of the house—Ayeon in front with Wonpil, Dowoon and Younghyun and Nayeon trailing just behind, then Sungjin with his hands fisted in his jacket, and then Hyerim and Jae. She walks slowly, twisting strand of hair around her finger, but he keeps pace with her. If she were younger, she’d take this as a sign of something. As it is, she knows better than to hope for more than just this. What they shared yesterday is all she’ll ever get.

The sun sits low on the horizon, a red ember lost at sea. The others stand silhouetted in the semi-dark, their faces aglow in pink and blue. Hyerim’s heart catches on a beat. She takes a breath, a deep gasp, like she’s trying to take the sunlight right into her body.

“Hyerim.”

Jae turns to her, hands in his pockets, the sunlight reflected on his glasses rendering his eyes invisible. She looks instead into a blazing yellow glow, and then the downward tilt of his mouth.

“I hope you come visit,” he smiles. His head tilts, and his eyes flash back into view. He looks sad. “I’m really going to miss you.”

She knows a hundred platitudes for times like this, but she can’t think of any of them. Instead she steps forward and slips her arms around him, pulling close, close enough to hear his heart beating in his chest.

Standing there, his arms around her and the sun rising slowly into the sky, she wonders what would happen if she said something. Did something. Something crazy, like follow him to the other side of the globe just to see if happiness might be within grasp. If life is a script already written, or a thousand undetermined paths. If the firework set off in the sky will burst into a million glittering shooting stars, or if it will simply die in the night, fizzling into nothing, a silent and unfinished gasp.

  
  
  
  
  


Ayeon hangs back as she watches Jae load his suitcases into the trunk of the taxi.

Somehow, this feels like the ending of something, like from this point forward they move on with their adult lives, free of those last bits of their pasts hanging around their ankles like seaweed dragged up from the water. No one else knows, but she’s got her own suitcases already loaded in the trunk of her car, and a plan to stay with Suji in Seoul long enough to get herself set up. She’s going to do it, this time. She’s going to make something out of her fledgling daydream. She’s going to stand up on a stage and play her own songs.

She’s not going to tell anyone until after she goes. Not because she thinks they wouldn’t let her, but she’s afraid that if Younghyun asks her to stay, she might listen, falling right back into the same patterns that got her to where she is now, treading water as she’s pulled endlessly out to sea.

That’s the trouble with love, though. Love happens between people—messy, unpredictable, unbearable  _ people _ , trying to make something beautiful out of their cracked and bruised hearts. She watches Jae’s hand linger against Hyerim’s back, the way his eyes rest on her for a little too long, like he knows he’s about to go away from something he’ll never get back. But it’s not like he could keep it, anyway. Not like any of them can.

Jae climbs into the taxi and waves goodbye out the back windshield until the car disappears around a bend. Then they are all left standing there, looking at one another, trying to decide what to do next.

Ayeon turns and sees the brilliant sun now high in the sky, and she knows that this is only one ending, until the story starts over again.

  
  
  
  
  
  
_End_.  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I have never been to Tongyeong, so apologies for any major inaccuracies.
> 
> Still not sure how I ended up with this iteration of this fic. Or why everyone enables me to write the crackships I want to write, lol.
> 
> Thank you so much to my long-suffering friends who read this along the way. One thing I love about writing is being able to bring an idea to you guys and get new insights and affirmation I never could have on my own. You guys make writing good. Thanks for being the best <3


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